Recently, a friend of mine came across the blog of animator Chris Harding. After a few minutes of reading the blog out-loud (in a less-than subtle way of catching my attention) my friend aroused my interests and I began to read the blog, too (sometimes out-loud as well).

Chris Harding is quite an inspirational animator. His approach to animation as the vehicle of an idea yields work with thought and direction- rather than being some aggregation of punchlines and plot twists. Here is one of his films:

View Harding’s animated short: Learn Self Defense

I’d also like to share some passages of his that I found particularly insightful:

The only way for me to motivate myself is with ideas. If I’m in love with an idea enough, and I can’t communicate that idea by any other method I feel the strong need to animate it. -Cold Hard Flash Interview

What are animated shorts good for in the world? Maybe they make someone laugh for a couple seconds, but so does an ill-timed fart. I hope in the long run there’s a little bit more value to this work than a puff of gas and noise. If not, we should all go be paramedics and put ourselves to better use. - Present Magazine

If you know me you’ve probably heard me quote this from Bertolt Brecht:

Organization

Mr. K. once said: ‘The thinking man does not use one light too many, one piece of bread too many, one idea too many.’

And here is Chris Harding’s take:

The whole goal with short films is to distill an idea down to its essence without being simplistic. So you keep honing until you’re left with all the necessary information, and not one speck more.

So as you see, I was right all along… ;) Well, at least another person out there sees things similarly. I’m thankful that Chris maintains a blog and I hope to see more work from him in the future.

If you want an inspired laugh, read Chris Harding’s About page. It is quite fun (and delightfully satirical).

-Tom

I like to check CGsociety’s forums fairly often. Every now and then I come across something there that is fairly inspiring. (Although I must admit, I come across a lot of uninspiring things there as well.)

 In any case, I came across a film made by Tim Marchant called “Tidy Monster”. I think what really inspired me was the simplicity of the execution. You can watch it on Tim’s site and the film is on youtube here.

 Before I go on, I’d like to clarify what I mean by “simplicity”. I guess the term could be interpreted in many ways. I certainly do not mean that the film was simple; I mean, rather, to emphasize the fact that the visuals did not try to overpower or convolute the idea behind the film. Given the dialog in “Tidy Monster”, I think many animators/filmmakers would tend to try to cram as many insane visuals into the piece as they could. It is this kind of thinking often leads films deep into the ground. Humor me as I indulge in an analogy:

Let’s say we were making soup. First we should probably decide what kind of soup we want to make- we may call this the idea behind the soup (I know… reaaaaally subtle). There are numerous possibilities as far as types of soup, but for the purposes of this metaphor, and because I am a vegetarian… we’re going to make some delicious broccoli cheddar soup. Now we heat up some water, we prepare the pot and we put in the basic ingredients- essentially we give the soup a basic structure and context. So far so good…

Now its time to really make it taste gooooood. So what do we do? We find EEEEverything we like and we toss it in!! You like hot-dogs? In they go! How about some pancakes with loads of syrup? Throw’em in! I know, FRIED snickers bars… they’re all the rage- what the hell- toss a dozen of those in! And ice-cream goddammit… loads of ice-cream. Oh man oh man oh man oh man YEEEESSSSS!

Anybody want some soup?

The point I’m trying to make is putting a lot of “cool” stuff together does not make a good soup… errr… film. As much as we love those fried snickers bars, we need to cut them out if they do not point the audience toward something vital to the film’s idea. The idea is key… and sorry, no amount of technical goodies will ever replace the idea. At least not for me.

Anyway, I’m going to go vomit.